Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, June 30, 2014

The delay
of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and
his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of
energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no
reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East,
there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s.

The latest
news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway
Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil—to Asia.

The pure
evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline—that
will not require taxpayer funding—represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene
rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what
oil, coal, and natural gas does.

Less
visible has been the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that has,
since Obama took office on January 20, 2009, issued 2,827 new final regulations
totally 24,915,000 words to fill 24,915 pages of the Federal Register. As a
CNSnews article reported, “The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many
words as the entire Harry Potter series which includes seven books with
1,084,170 words.” Every one of the EPA regulations affects some aspect of life
in America, crushing economic development in every conceivable way.

The worst
part of the EPA regulation orgy is the fact that virtually all of it is based
on a hoax. As reported by James Delingpole, a British journalist, “19 million
jobs lost plus $4,335 trillion spent equals a global mean temperature of 0.018
degrees Celsius. Yes, horrible but true. These are the costs to the U.S.
economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war on
carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired
electricity generating plants by 30% before 2005 levels.”

Citing a
study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Delingpole reported that the new
regulations will cost the economy another $51 billion annually, result in the
224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per
year in higher prices for energy, food, and other necessities.”

This is an
all-out attack on industry, business, and the use of electricity by all
Americans.

There is
absolutely no reason, nor need to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions,
particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas on which all life on Earth depends
because it is to vegetation what oxygen is to all living creatures. It is the
“food” on which every blade of grass depends. More CO2 means more crops and
healthier forests.

Disastrously,
even the Supreme Court—the same one that signed off on Obamacare as a tax—has
not ruled against the EPA’s false assertions about CO2. In late June, however,
it did place limits on the EPA’s effort to limit power plant and factory
emissions blamed for a global warming that does not exist. The Earth has been
cooling for seventeen years, but the Court ruled that the EPA lacked authority
in some cases to force companies to evaluate ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

As Craig
Rucker, the Executive Director of the free market think tank, CFACT, points out,
“The Court served notice that the Executive Branch cannot unilaterally write
its own laws. This is an important principle. However, the United States still
remains fated to suffer most of the economic damage EPA’s regulations will
cause. True reform will require congressional action.”

Thanks to
the lies that have been taught about “global warming”, now called “climate
change”, in the nation’s schools to a generation of Americans, and the deluge
of lies about the environment that have been repeated in the nation’s media,
too many Americans still do not make the connection between the use of the
nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, and their personal
lifestyles and the nation’s economic growth.

The
attacks on the energy industries by environmental organizations have been
attacks on all Americans who turn on the lights or drive anywhere. Their mantra
has been “dirty coal” and “dirty oil” along with lies about the way energy
industries contribute billions to the nation’s revenue in taxes.

An example
of these attacks have been those directed against “fracking”, the short term
for hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has been in use for more than a
half century and whose development has generated a boom in natural gas these
days. Claims about fracking pollution have no basis in fact.

A new
book, “The Fracking Truth—America’s Energy Revolution: The Inside, Untold Story”,
by Chris Faulkner is well worth reading for the extraordinary way he explains
fracking and the facts he provides about energy in America. It is published by
Platform Press.

America
has huge reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. “This phenomenon of energy
abundance and efficiency,” says Faulkner, “makes it almost a certainty that the
cost of powering our nation—already a bargain by international standards—is
going to become even less of a burden for our economy for many decades to
come.” But not if the EPA and other Obama government agencies such as the
Department of the Interior have their way.

One
example: “According to the American Petroleum Institute, at least 87% of our
federal offshore acreage is off-limits to drilling. API commissioned the consultancy
Wood Mackenzie to assess the foregone offshore opportunity in specific terms.
The upshot: Increased access to oil and gas reserves underlying federal waters
could, by 2025, generate an additional 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per
day, add $150 billion to government revenues, and create 530,00 jobs.”

“In fact,
since 2007, about 96% of the increase in America’s oil and gas production
occurred on private lands in the United States. Meanwhile, oil and gas
production on federal lands declined to a ten-year low in fiscal years
2011-2012.”

Who is
forcing coal-fired electricity plants to close? The Obama administration. Who
is denying access to vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas on federal
lands? The Obama administration. Who continues to lie about “climate change”
pegged to carbon dioxide emissions? The Obama administration. And this is
happening as China and India cannot build new coal-fired plants fast enough and
Europe abandons wind and solar energy.

Who is the
enemy of energy, current and future, in the United States? Barack Obama.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

You have
to know that the Obama administration has run out of excuses for destroying the
U.S. economy when it starts to blame it on the weather.

According
to the Commerce Department, the economy based on its Gross domestic product--the value of its goods and services--fell at a seasonally adjusted annual rate
of 2.9% in the first quarter of this year. That was the largest recorded drop
since the end of World War II in 1945!

The June
20 edition of The Wall Street Journal’s article, “Economy Shrank Rapidly in First Quarter” led off by reporting that “Weather disruptions at home and weak
demand abroad caused a contraction in the U.S. economy in the first quarter,
renewing doubts about the strength of the nation’s five-year-old recovery.”

What
recovery? When the economy stays in the basement for five years you are looking
at an on-going stagnation based on too much government interference with growth,
the decline of the nation’s middle class, the lack of new start-up businesses,
and the reluctance or inability of consumers to spend money, if they have any
to spend.

In May,
writing on his blog, Economic Collapse, Michael Synder pointed to “27 Hugh Red Flags for the U.S. Economy” noting, for example, that according to government
numbers, “everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all American families.” The
other indicators include:

# Sales
for construction equipment were down 13% in April and have been down for 17
months in a row.

# During
the first quarter of 2014, profits at the office supplies giant, Staples, fell
by 43.5%

# Foot
traffic at Wal-Mart stores fell by 1.4% during the first quarter of 2014.

# It is
being projected that Sears will soon close hundreds more stores and may go out
of business altogether.

# Existing
home sales have fallen for seven of the last eight months and seem to repeating
a pattern witnessed back in 2007 prior to the last financial crash.

# The home
ownership rate in the U.S. has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

You do not
have to be an economist to understand that President Obama’s economic policies
are flat-out failures that include a “stimulus” that wasted billions of
taxpayer dollars without stimulating the economy, nor that having a $17
trillion debt means anything other than a nation teetering on a massive
economic collapse.

In May,
CNSnews reported that “A record 92,594,000 Americans were not in the labor force
in April as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8
percent, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

This is not my definition of a “recession” although we
are told that it ended in 2009. This is a “depression” for millions of
Americans. The labor force participation rate has gone from 63.5% to 63.3%, the
lowest since 1979, but the Obama administration keeps telling us that it is
“improving.”

Consumer spending is down. Exports are down. Employment
is barely increasing. The only thing that is up is inflation.

Edward C. Prescott, a 2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics
and Lee E. Ohanian, a professor of economics UCLA, writing in the June 26
edition of The Wall Street Journal, noted that the declining GDP rate was “the
worst productivity statistic since 1990. And productivity since 2005 has
declined by more than 8% relative to its long-run trend. This means that
business output is nearly $1 trillion less today than what it would be had
productivity continued to grow at its average rate of about 2.5% per year.”

“Lagging productivity growth is an enormous problem
because virtually all of the increase in Americans’ standard of living is made
possible by rising worker productivity.”

The Obama administration would have you believe that the
economic decline in the first quarter was due to a harsh winter. They will be
blaming it on a hot summer come autumn.

This is an administration whose main theme these days is
the threat of “climate change”, but it has nothing to do with the climate and
everything to do with vast government spending and borrowing, an explosion of
regulations that have slowed or stopped the creation of new businesses, a “war
on coal” that is forcing a decline in the production of electricity, and a
widespread perception that the President is the worst to have held office since
the nation began.

There is no recovery. There is a return to the factors
that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Government entities Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac that bought up all the sub-prime mortgage loans and packaged them
as assets are still in business. Credit card companies are reaching out to
sub-prime users, signing them up. Nobody seems to learn anything from the past,
even if it is the recent past.

If the control of the U.S. Senate cannot be wrested away from
a Democratic Party led by Harry Reid and a GOP increase in the U.S. House that
was led by Nancy Pelosi until the 2010 elections cannot be achieved in the
forthcoming November elections, the President’s continued attack on the
economy—which includes a massive increase in illegal immigration—the nation’s
economy will remain tenuous.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Thursday, June 26, 2014

“I cannot undertake to
lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to
Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their
constituents. … If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by
money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a
limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one. …

The powers delegated by
the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those
which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. … The
government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified
objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general.

Charity is no part of
the legislative duty of the government. … There are more instances of the
abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of
those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

- James Madison

When
people are asked to name the Founding Fathers of the nation, they usually reel
off Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the first, second and third Presidents in
addition to their earlier role in guiding the Revolution to success.

Occasionally,
someone who, like myself, loves history will add Madison, the fourth President,
but Lynne Cheney’s new biography of Madison rightly identifies him as the man
most responsible “for creating the United States of America in the form we know
it today.” It was Madison who guided the process by which the Founders arrived
at the Constitution, contributing the fundamental principles it incorporated and
writing the Bill of Rights, amendments that ensured its ratification by the
original states.

Cheney’s
biography, “James Madison: A Life Considered” ($36.00, Viking) benefits not
only from her scholarship, but from her facility with the written word, making
it a continual pleasure to read for a book of 563 pages, including its notes,
bibliography, and index. If you were to set aside the summer to read just one
book, this would be the one I would recommend.

If
Cheney’s name rings a bell, it is because she is the wife of former Vice
President Dick Cheney, but she is also a Ph.D. who has been studying Madison
since 1987 when she was a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the
Constitution. These days she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute.

The
Cheney’s reside in Wilson, Wyoming. She is making the rounds of radio and
television shows to promote her book and, most notably, interviewers tend to
ignore her book in order to pry an opinion out of her about current events and
politics. One gets the feeling that most did not read her book.

Those
short in stature and, compared to the other Founders, quite young, all who came
to know him swiftly developed a profound respect for his intellect and his
knowledge of how governments were structured with some succeeding while others
failed. When Madison spoke, they listened. There were in those days “factions”
(which today we call political parties) that opposed his and the other
Founder’s views.

“Jefferson,”
wrote Cheney, “would later say that it was a wonder that Madison accomplished
so much as he had, given that he faced ‘the endless quibbles, chicaneries,
perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers’” and Madison
himself was often struck “by the way that ‘important bills prepared at leisure
by skillful hands’ were treated to ‘crudeness and tedious discussion’, and he
had seen legislative tricks of the most blatant sort.” So the politics of
Madison’s time was not unlike much of today’s.

After the
Constitution was written to replace the failed Articles of Confederation it
needed to be vigorously defended. America benefited greatly from the fact that
its population was highly literate and it was the Federalist papers, a series
of essays mostly written by Madison was the way its principles and protections
were explained to the public. Chaney notes that the Federalist essay that would
eventually become most famous was the first one Madison wrote.

“In
Federalist 10, published November 22,1787, he set forth the failures of ‘our
governments’ (rather than ‘our states’ where, after all, the Constitution would
be ratified), noting the instability and injustices that had caused good
citizens across the country to increasingly distrust those governments and feel
‘alarm for private rights.’”

These
alarms are reflected in our times by concerns that the President is bypassing
Congress to govern by executive orders, is failing to enforce laws with which
he disagrees, and that we have a Department of Justice and an IRS that cannot
be trusted to apply laws fairly, acting against groups and individuals with
whom they disagree such as the Tea Party movement and other conservative
organizations. A rogue agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency is so
out of control that Congress must at some point exert powerful restraints on
it.

What is
remarkable about Madison’s time was the fact that he, Jefferson is lifelong
friend, and Adams, all lived long lives unlike the bulk of the population.
Madison would devote his life to the creation of our extraordinary government
and, throughout the early presidencies including his own, to ensuring the existence
of the new nation, challenged as it was by Great Britain, first during the
Revolution and then in the War of 1812.

On his
last day as President, Madison vetoed an improvements bill, “arguing as he had
since the days of The Federalist that
the general government did not have general powers. It had specified powers,
and recognizing its limits was essential to ‘the permanent success of the
Constitution.’”

Cheney
wrote that Madison understood that “if the limits the Constitution imposed on
government were unrecognized, ‘the parchment had better be thrown into the fire
at once.”, but Madison was all about protecting the Constitution and the new
nation. For that he is owed the gratitude of all the generations that have
followed him.

It is now
our responsibility to protect it because freedom and liberty always have
domestic and foreign enemies.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The first
time I heard the term “military advisors” it was being used by John F. Kennedy
and they were being sent to South Vietnam. A strong anti-communist, in 1961
Kennedy approved financing an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese army
from 150,000 to 170,000 along with sending a thousand U.S. military advisors to
help train them. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.

Earlier,
the North Korean attack on the South had ended in a stalemate. Technically a
state of war still exists.Since 1953,
the U.S. has maintained a military force in South Korea. In the wake of World
War II, we still have a military presence in Europe and Japan to aid in their
defense.

Obama’s
announcement that 300 military advisors are being sent to Iraq is too little,
too late.

As of this
writing Americans are witnessing what happened when Obama withdrew from Iraq
and are anticipating the same result when we withdraw from Afghanistan. Yes, we
were and are war-weary, but we do not like what we’re seeing in Iraq and the
President’s foreign policy failures are compounding by the day.

We are
weary, too, after six and a half years of the presidency of Barack Hussein
Obama. It has taken this long for all the predictions regarding his lack of
experience and competence to come true.

The polls
taken during the past week provide evidence of this. Gallup’s job approval poll
of June 9-15 showed that 42% of “national adults” approved. Over at Rasmussen
Reports, Obama’s job approval on June 21 was 48%. Asked by Rasmussen if the
nation is headed in the right direction or not, 67% of likely voters said it
was not. Reacting to the immigration invasion crisis a Gallup found that 69%
thought he was doing a poor job.

Depending
on events, polls rise and fall, but the numbers indicate a growing loss of confidence
in Obama’s decisions and actions to date. I suspect that what they do not show
is a growing sense of the man as utterly untrustworthy and increasingly distant
from the demands of the office.

We
are witnessing the implosion of the Obama presidency.

All
presidencies have a scandal or two, usually relatively minor in the grand
scheme of national management. Watergate was considered minor initially and
took two years to materialize into the scandal that forced Nixon to resign.
Obama, however, has generated directly and indirectly enough scandals for their
combined weight to begin being noticed even by those who pay little attention
to Washington, D.C.

The worst
of the latest has been the revelation of how the Internal Revenue Service was
politicized to attack organizations that were deemed to be affiliated with the
Tea Party movement and patriotic objectives. The “loss” of Lois Lerner's emails
and others smells of the destruction of evidence Congress has demanded. The one
element of the government that virtually all Americans interact with is the IRS.

Other
scandals like Solyndra, representing the waste of billions on wind and solar
companies, many of which went bankrupt after receiving all manner of grants and
loans, did not registered in a similar fashion. The wiretapping of Associated
Press reporters’ phone calls likewise did not evoke widespread concern. The
failure of the “stimulus” that spent billions without producing an uptick in
the economy was seen as just another way the government wastes our money. Even
“Fast and Furious” in which thousands of weapons were purchased and transferred
to Mexican drug cartels did not evoke more than a short expression of dismay.

Benghazi,
however, in which a U.S. ambassador died along with three others, remains an
unresolved scandal as much for the lies about a video as its cause as for the
tragedy of the abandonment of those killed. The release of five leaders of the
Taliban from Guantanamo without letting Congress know has piled on the previous
scandals to a point where serious concerns about both Obama’s judgment have arisen.

What
remains now is a combination of the President’s increasing use of Executive
Orders to create as much mischief as possible along with the perception that he
simply does not care what Americans in general and Congress in particular
thinks about what he is doing. There is talk in the House of bringing a legal
suit against the President regarding his heavy use of Executive Orders to
bypass Congress while initiating policies that require congressional inclusion
and oversight.

Those of
us who pay close attention to what the President is doing know that the
ultimate aim of his actions in office has been to harm the nation in a variety
of ways from reducing our military to pre-World War Two levels to destroying a
large element of the nation’s electrical energy supply by forcing coal-fired plants
out of business.

Ultimately,
the implosion of the Obama presidency has been the realization that he has put
the nation at risk of the world’s bad actors by causing America’s global
leadership position to erode. Americans have been accustomed to being a leading
military and economic power since the end of World War Two and he has been
undermining that in every way possible.

Voter
payback is likely to see a major shift of political power in Congress away from
the Democratic Party in the forthcoming midterm elections and would enable
Republicans to slow or stop further damage to the nation. Failing that, the
fate of the nation will be a great risk.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

It’s
vacation time for the nation’s school kids and, while they play, states are
beginning to push back against the latest effort of the federal government to
exert total control over the nation’s schools; Common Core, whose curriculum
standards and content rapidly revealed it to be a nightmare.

As I
frequently note, the word “education” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution
because the Founding Fathers knew full well that education was the job of
localities and states to ensure quality and the opportunity that it provides
everyone willing to learn the basics and beyond. From its earliest days,
Americans would create a town, build a church, and follow up with a school.
Until liberals complained about it, school days began with a prayer.

Liberals
know that whoever controls schools controls the future. Dictatorships of all
descriptions in particular place heavy emphasis on raising new generations with
the kind of indoctrination that only the early years in school can impart. It
should come as no surprise that the last failed liberal President, Jimmy
Carter, ushered in the creation of the U.S. Department of Education

Still
largely unknown to the general public is the control of the Department by
teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation
of Teachers, and their support of the Democratic Party. This accounts for much
of the well documented decline of education in America. The union’s chief
concern is higher pay and benefits for teachers, not the welfare of the
children in their care. Their focus is on politics, not teaching.

In March,
the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom issued a new study on
“Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 years” which revealed that
“the average state has seen a three percent decline in academic performance
despite a more than doubling in inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending.”
Sometimes the spending increases are astonishing as in the case of New York
State in which spending rose by 115%. California and Florida are not far behind
with an increase of 80%.

Common
Core has rapidly become a political hot potato as parents have let their state
governors and legislators know how bad it is. Writing in the Heartland
Institute’s May edition of its newsletter, School Reform News, Joy Pullmann,
its managing editor, reported that Indiana Gov. Mike Pense was the first to
sign a bill in March rejecting Common Core national standards, “but the parents
and curriculum experts whose criticism led to the change also criticized the
first draft of replacement standards for looking very similar to the Common
Core mandates it is meant to replace.”

In a
Heartland booklet, “The Common Core: A Bad Choice for America”, Pullmann notes
that “States may not change Common Core standards, must adopt all of them at
once, and may only add up to an additional 15 percent of requirements. The
standards themselves have no clear governance, meaning there is no procedure
for states to follow to make changes they feel are necessary. It is highly
unlikely individual states would control or greatly influence any such
process.”

At the
very heart of the debate concerning Common Core is the notion that every single
school in America should teach the exact same thing in the exact same way.
That’s not how real education works and any teacher will tell you that
different students learn at different rates and some require some extra help. Schools free of such one-size-fits-all thinking educated
generations of Americans who made the nation the greatest economic power in the
world.

Thus far,
in addition to Indiana, state legislatures in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and
Missouri have approved measures to exit Common Core’s national standards.
Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal in mid-June said “We want out of Common Core” and
is taking steps to reject it.

Common
Core is the fulfillment of liberal’s dream of education. It was developed in
2009 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State
School Officers. It was quickly incentivized by the Obama administration with
$4.35 billion in Race to the Top competitive grants and waivers from the
federal No Child Left Behind law for states that signed on. Minus the states
that have rejected Common Core, there are still 42 who have adopted it.

Ron Paul, commenting on the Oklahoma opt-out, said “Common
Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American
people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and
education “experts.” In exchange for federal funds, states must change their
curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with 'reform
math.' Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on 'abstract
thinking' instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction.
Schools must also replace classic works of literature with ‘informational’
texts, such as studies by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Those poor
kids!”

Common
Core’s curriculum standards are testimony to why abandoning local control over
a community’s or city’s educational program is a very bad idea and why, once
again, the federal government has demonstrated why it makes worse virtually any
program that should be left to the states.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Fifty years ago, 1964, the civil
rights movement that had begun in the 1950s achieved its goal with the Civil
Rights Act and a year later with the Voting Rights Act.

A remarkable book, “Please Stop
Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed”, by Jason L.
Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board who is black,
should be must-reading by Afro-Americans and white Americans to understand that,
while there has been progress for those blacks who achieved an education and
moved into the middle and upper classes of America, far too many blacks have
embraced a culture that has doomed them to poverty, prison, and a sense of
victimization.

Having lived through the civil rights
movement, observing it from the vantage point of having seen the segregation and
prejudice that had afflicted blacks prior to it, I was not surprised by the
evidence put forth in Riley’s book of self-inflicted failure to embrace the
opportunities as other groups have done.

On June 16 Riley wrote an opinion
article, “How Not to Help Black
Americans”, saying that “The Obama presidency is evidence that blacks
have progressed politically. But if the rise of other racial and ethnic groups
is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics
than about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a
consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in
hiring.”

Statistics from the U.S. Census
Bureau in 2012 are testimony to the progress black Americans have made since
1964. Out of 313 million Americans, blacks constitute 44.5 million and 83.2% of
blacks age 25 and older had a high school diploma while 18.7% had a bachelor’s
degree or higher; 1.6 million had an advanced degree. Blacks can take pride in
their 2.4 military veterans.

However, the median income of black
households in 2012 was $33,321, compared with the rest of the nation at $51,017
and the poverty rate was 27.2% while nationally it was 15%.

Referring to the vast welfare state
in America, Riley said “One reason that Uncle Sam’s altruism has not been
successful is because the government is attempting to do for blacks what blacks
can only do for themselves.”

The most depressing statistic,
however, is the 40% of some 2.1 million male inmates in jails and prisons in
America who are black. Statistically, blacks are far more likely to be the
victims of crimes by other blacks than by non-blacks. In his book, Riley says
“Black cultural attitudes toward work, authority, dress, sex, and violence have
also proven counterproductive, inhibiting the development of the kind of human
capital that has led to socioeconomic advancement for other groups.”

One black who has succeeded is Barack
Hussein Obama, twice elected President of the United States of America. It is
likely he will be the last black American to hold that office for a generation
or more to come because he has done more harm to the nation in six and a half
years than any previous President. The only part of the population that does not
seem to grasp this has been black Americans.

Ironically, the results of a survey
by Rasmussen Reports released in July 2013 found that “Americans consider blacks
more likely to be racist than whites and Hispanics. Thirty-seven percent (37%)
of American adults thought most black Americans are racist while just 15%
considered most white Americans racist. Just 30% of all Americans thought that
race relations in America were good or excellent. Race in America has been a
contentious issue from the days of the founders and earlier.

The black community in America has
some truly outstanding leaders these days such as former Representative Allen
West and Dr. Ben Carson, and there has been a generation of blacks
who have risen to success in the corporate world or as entrepreneurs and
professionals.

America’s first black President has
done little to improve the lives of black Americans, resisting charter schools
and vouchers to free them from failed public schools, and embracing the same
tried-and-failed liberal social programs that continue to keep too many in
poverty or in jail. Obama’s two terms in office will be remembered for their
scandals and for their attacks on the liberty and freedom that all Americans
value.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

I know
it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I miss Saddam Hussein.

Yes, he
was a cruel despot. Between September 1980 and July 1988 he pursued an
eight-year war against Iran that killed an estimated combined million troops on
both sides and achieved nothing. He had ruled from 1979 until 2003 when George
W. Bush decided to remove him by invading Iraq, believing as other nations did
that he had weapons of mass destruction. Had he not posed a constant threat to
neighboring nations, he might still be in charge. He was hanged in 2006, but
the U.S. would stay on until our troops were withdrawn by Barack Obama in 2011.

In places
where troops have remained like Germany, Japan and South Korea, a long state of
peace has existed. At their invitation we have military installations in 130
nations around the world.

“The Great
Big Book of Horrible Things” by Matthew White provides a brief review of
Saddam’s dictatorship, noting that “Iraq is an artificial country with borders
that were drawn to suit the European colonial powers rather than to reflect
local allegiances.” He could say the same thing of Syria what owes its borders
to decisions made following World War One by the British and French.

Saddam
maintained control by propagandizing himself as a great hero and by killing or
imprisoning anyone who disagreed. There was no end to the barbarism he imposed.
The Kurds were blamed for the loss of the war with Iran and it is estimated he
killed anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 Kurds between February and September
1988; some of them with poison gas. In 1991, after an American-led coalition
drove Saddam out of Kuwait, the Shiite Arabs of the southern marshes rose in
revolt and some 50,000 were massacred. The Kurds were driven into the mountains
of the north and American air cover helped them establish an autonomous zone.

Libya
experienced a similar dictatorship by Muammar Gaddafi who took power in 1969
until overthrown during the “Arab Spring” in 2011, a revolt that has left a
barely functioning nation. Like Saddam he exercised the same repression to
control the nation’s tribes.

Not a
classic dictator like Saddam and Gaddafi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a former air
force general, kept tight control there from 1981 to 2001 thanks to the support
of the military. He was a major U.S. ally. After Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood was deposed in the wake of Mubarak’s removal, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi,
another general was elected to the office of president.

An ongoing
civil war in Syria has killed an estimated 160,000 to date and Bashar al-Assad
is the son of its previous dictator, Hafiz, who had seized power in 1970 and
was elected president a year later, never to relinquish the office until he
died in 2000. Al-Assad presently controls about forty percent of the nation,
supported by his tribe, the Alawites and military aid from Iran.

What these
dictators had in common was a Middle East that did not directly challenge the
United States or the West. They were more interested in selling oil. The
opposition they encountered was the combination of opposition to the oppressive
nature of their rule and the rise of a resurgent Islamist movement that
believed their nations should embrace Sharia law.

The war to
force Russia out of Afghanistan had led to the creation of al Qaeda and
subsequent Islamist groups like the Taliban that divide into Sunni versus
Shiite loyalties. The newest of these groups is the Islamic State in Syria and
Iraq/al Sham (ISIS). The brutality of the ISIS warriors is the latest horror
story, but it is a very old story as far as the Middle East is concerned.

Before we
begin to feel good about ourselves as highly civilized citizens of Western civilization,
we should address the fact that, in the last century alone, an estimated 200
million people died in its wars, large and small. European history is one of
wars with interludes of peace. The West’s technological advancement enabled
wars of massive death for soldier and civilian alike.

In his
book, “The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War”, David
Livingstone Smith, reflecting on the last century, noted that “The frequency of
armed conflict across the globe and throughout history is staggering.”
Published in 2007, Smith said that “Looking at forty-one modern nation-states
between 1800 and 1945, we find that they average 1.4 wars per generation and
18.5 years of war per generation.” It gives a whole new meaning to the term
“endless war.”

“We are
extremely dangerous animals,” Smith concluded, “and the balance of evidence
suggests that our taste for killing is not some sort of cultural artifact, but
was bred into us over millions of years by natural and sexual selection.” We are,
however, “ambivalent about killing and it is impossible to understand the
relationship between war and human nature without taking this into
consideration.”

Matthew
White notes that the twentieth century has been the bloodiest on record,
particularly when you include the millions killed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao,
the latter two, who in addition to waging war also killed millions to establish
Communism in Russia and China.

Hitler not
only waged war but engaged in the genocide of Europe’s Jews, killing an
estimated six million and another five million gypsies, homosexuals, unionists,
and others that were regarded as “enemies of the state.” In the last century,
the Japanese Empire mastered Western warfare and sought expansion, waging war
against Russia and China, and engaging in World War Two.

Why did
the world break into an unprecedented wave of killing in the last century?
White narrowed it down to three reasons: (1) Because they could. (2) Because
they wanted to and (3) because everybody else was doing it.

What
should we do in Iraq? In my opinion we should bomb the Islamic State of Syria and
Iraq to oblivion. ISIS wants to establish an Islamic caliphate from which it
would extend its barbaric belief system to the world. If Saddam was still the Iraqi dictator, he would never have permitted ISIS to exist. Now we must destroy it. No troops on the ground,
just American air power. We have it and we must use it before ISIS becomes an even
greater threat. It’s not about Iraq. It’s about us.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Thursday, June 19, 2014

While our
attention is focused on events in the Middle East, a domestic enemy of the
nation is doing everything in its power to kill the provision of electricity to
the nation and, at the same time, to control every drop of water in the United
States, an attack on its agricultural sector. That enemy is the Environmental
Protection Agency.

Like the
rest of the Obama administration, it has no regard for real science and
continues to reinterpret the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It has an agenda
that threatens every aspect of life in the nation.

As Craig
Rucker, the Executive Director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
(CFACT) recently warned, “True to her word,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy,
“is busily grabbing powers for EPA that Congress specifically chose not to
grant, and that the Supreme Court has denied on multiple occasions.”

“The
federal bureaucracy under the Obama presidency has a voracious appetite for
more power. It despises individual liberty and drags down the economy every
change it gets,” Rucker warns.

In
addition to implementing President Obama’s “war on coal” that is depriving the
nation of coal-fired plants that provide electricity, the EPA has announced a
proposed rule titled “Definition of ‘Waters of the United States’ Under the
Clean Water Act”, redefining, as Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise reported in the Washington Examiner
“nearly everything wet as ‘waters of the United States or WOTUS—and potentially
subject us all to permits and fines.”

The
President has made it clear that the rule of law has no importance to him and
his administration and this is manifestly demonstrated by the actions of the
EPA. “This abomination,” says Arnold, “is equivalent to invasion by hostile
troops out to seize the jurisdictions of all 50 states. WOTUS gives
untrustworthy federal bureaucrats custody of everywatershed, creates crushing new power to
coerce all who keep America going and offers no benefit to the victimized and
demoralized tax-paying public.”

In
response to the EPA’s new power grab, more than 200 House members called on the
Obama administration in May to drop its plans to expand the EPA’s
jurisdiction over smaller bodies of water around the nation. A letter was sent
to EPA Administrator McCarthy and Department of Army Secretary John M. McHugh
(re: Army Corps of Engineers) asking that the proposal be withdrawn.

“Under
this plan, there’d be no body of water in America—including mud puddles and
canals—that wouldn’t be at risk from job-destroying federal regulation,” said
Rep, Doc Hastings (R-Wash), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
“This dramatic expansion of federal government control will directly impact the
livelihoods and viability of farmers and small businesses in rural America.”

Nearly
thirty major trade associations have joined together to create the Waters
Advocacy Coalition. They represent the nation’s construction, manufacturing,
housing, real estate, mining, agricultural and energy sectors. The coalition
supports S. 2245, “Preserve the Waters of the U.S. Act” which would prevent the
EPA and Corps of Engineers from issuing their “Final Guidance on Identifying
Waters Protected by the Clean Water Act.”

What has
this nation come to if the Senate has to try to pass an act intended to prevent
the EPA from extending control over the nation’s waters beyond the Clean Waters
Act that identifies such control as limited to “navigable waters”? You can’t
navigate a water ditch or a puddle!

There are
acts that limit agencies such as the EPA from going beyond their designated
powers. They are the Regulatory Flexibility Act and the Small Business
Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act.The
coalition says that the EPA and Corps “should not be allowed to use guidance to
implement the largest expansion of Clean Water Act authority since it was
enacted. Only Congress has the authority to make such a sweeping change.”

In two
Supreme Court decisions, one in 2001 and another in 2006, rejected regulation
of “isolated waters” by the EPA.

It does
not matter to the EPA or the Obama administration what the Supreme Court has
ruled Congress has enacted in the Clean Water Act, nor the Clean Air Act.

We are
witnessing an EPA that is acting as a criminal enterprise and it must be
stopped before it imposes so much damage on the nation that it destroys it.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Americans
are feeling the same fear for the future that preceded the Civil War when the
incompetent James Buchanan left the mess that Abraham Lincoln had to address. I
don’t think we have ever had a President with less knowledge of history than
Barack Obama and less ability to solve domestic economic problems and address
threatening foreign ones.

“Rarely
has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,”
said former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with his daughter Liz, in a June
18 opinion published by the Wall Street Journal. Liz has been a deputy
assistant secretary of state for eastern affairs.

My fear
now is that the President is not, as I originally assumed, driven just by
ideology, but that he keeps demonstrating the illegal use of powers that he
does not have under the Constitution, coupled with a disdain for the other
branch of government, the Congress.

If Obama
is eminently impeachable, but Congress is so divided that this is not an
option.

Despite
what his Justice Department told him, Obama disobeyed a law requiring him to
give Congress a 30-day notice for the exchange of terrorist detainees from
Guantanamo Bay. His use of executive orders may meet some legal standard, but
they are often his way of getting around legal limitations such as his wish to
open America’s borders to the flood of illegal immigrants we are seeing.

There is
some comfort in being someone who warned against electing him both times, but
there is no comfort in reviewing the harm he has done to date. Only a major
Republican victory in the November midterm elections will offer any protection
against him until he leaves office.

Let’s just
do a quick review:

He traded
five members of the Taliban’s highest ranked detainees from Guantanamo for an
alleged prisoner of war who deserted his unit in Afghanistan, negotiating with
the Islamic criminal group, the Haqqani, known for extracting high ransoms but
no mention of money has been made.

Having
initiated negotiations with Iran in a futile attempt to get them to cease
seeking their own nuclear arsenal, there is conjecture the U.S. will enlist
Iran’s help in addressing the jihadist attack on Iraq, but Iran has been the
declared enemy of the United States since it seized our diplomats in 1979 and
held them hostage until President Reagan was sworn into office. Iran is the
world’s greatest supporter of terror. It was behind the truck bomb that
destroyed our embassy in Beirut in 1984 and a few months later killed U.S.
Marines in an attack on their barracks there. It provided weapons to our
enemies during the Iraq war.

He has
driven the nation’s debt up so high that, for the first time in its history,
its credit rating was reduced. That debt continues to grow and is pegged at $17
trillion. The price of food is beginning to soar.

Unemployment
now affects the lives of those unable to find work—literally millions—and those
who have ceased to look. Raising the minimum wage will only serve to further
reduce job creation and opportunities. Millions are on food stamps while
millions are receiving disability benefits. There is likely no way to know who
legitimately deserves assistance and who does not. Increasing the rolls is seen
as ensuring the Democrat Party gets their vote.

He reduced
the funding of our military, reducing its fighting capacity to pre-World War
Two levels in manpower and the arsenal of weapons it requires. He advocated the
participation of homosexuals, a policy the military has long opposed for issues
of unit cohesion and morale. He advocated more female participation in the
military. Pastors and other chaplains serving the military were pressured to
alter their message to the troops.

Obama is on
record saying that “climate change” is the greatest enemy the U.S. military
will face. Climate change has been occurring for billions of years and is
entirely natural. It has nothing to do with waging war except for the
circumstances on a specific battlefield and that is called the “weather”, not
climate change.

Having
done nothing to stem illegal immigration, the nation is now besieged by
thousands of “refugees”, often very young, being bussed here from nations like
Nicaragua and Guatemala. They in turn are being “dumped” in Arizona and other
locations because the Texas immigration detention facilities are full. This
situation is being attributed to Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program that was initiated in 2012 to allow illegal immigrants who can to the
U.S. as minors to escape deportation for two years. In early June an additional
two years was tacked onto the program.

By pushing
Obamacare—the Affordable Patient Care Act—through Congress, Obama has
effectively destroyed the finest medical health system in the world, raising
the cost of health insurance, interfering with the doctor-patient relationship,
and causing several million Americans who already had health insurance to lose
it. He lied to achieve this and the Democrats knew it. No Republican in
Congress voted for it. By 2017 an estimated seven million workers will lose
employer provided coverage.

Just as
Obama’s indifference to fix the management problems of the Veterans
Administration has resulted in needless deaths, Obamacare’s death toll will
make that seem small when even policy holders are forced to wait for care
because hospitals have closed or there are fewer private practice physicians.

Obama’s
declared “war on coal” has already caused more than a hundred coal-fired plants
producing electricity to close, reducing the production of electricity at a
time the population is growing and the economy requires it for growth. The
emissions from such plants had already been reduced by 90% at a significant
cost. The EPA’s new regulations have no basis whatever in scientific fact. The
cost of electricity is already rising for many Americans and U.S. coal is being
shipped to China and India for their plants.

The
nation’s moral standards have been harmed by the implementation of same-sex
marriages which the President endorsed after reversing an earlier campaign
position. His view that legalizing marijuana is okay will have serious
implications that are already manifesting themselves at this point.

This is
just a thumbnail review of what has been happening to the nation and to all
Americans. We have survived incompetent presidents in the past, but Obama is
unique, not just for his ignorance and incompetence, but for his reliance on
lies to achieve his goal of reducing America as the one world power that has
been relied upon to resist the forces of evil that threaten mankind.

Having
begun with a quote by the Cheney’s, I will conclude with their view that “President
Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and
squandered our freedom.”

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

It is
depressing beyond words that we will have to endure two and a half more years
of an endless stream of lies about climate change from President Obama.

On June 14
he gave a commencement speech to graduates of the University of California at
Irvine, using it to tell Big Fat Lies, not the least of which was that the
Earth’s temperatures were rising when in fact they have been falling for nearly
eighteen years.

It is an
endless source of wonder to me that no part of the mainstream media disputes
him when he says things like this. For years now they have been reporting the
evidence of increasingly cold weather worldwide.

On the same day the President
was lying about warming, eight inches of snow fell in Rize, Turkey. It has
fallen as well in South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia while closer
to home snow fell on several cities in Idaho with cold freezes extending into
Oregon. In June!

Obama used
the speech to demand that politicians take steps to acknowledge climate change
which used to be called global warming until it became undeniable to everyone
except the charlatans lining their pockets with utterly bogus “research” that
underwrites the source of the lies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC).

Obama
continues to listen to his White House advisor, Dr. John Holdren, whose
contempt for the human race is such he would happily see large parts of it
disappear. In February, Holdren told reporters that all weather is impacted by
climate change, but that is what climate change has done for 4.5 billion years.
Not mentioned was that climate cycles are measured in centuries while weather
is a short-term event. The most recent mini-ice age lasted from 1300 to 1850.

Holdren
alluded to droughts affecting parts of the nation, claiming they were getting
longer and drying. Two leading climate scientists, former NASA scientist Dr.
Roy Spencer and University of Colorado climate scientists, Roger Pielke, Jr,
called Holdren’s assertions “pseudo-science rambling.” “The idea that any of
the weather we are seeing is in any significant way due to humanity’s
greenhouse gas emissions verges on irrationality,” said Spencer. Pielke called
Holdren’s assertions “zombie science.”

While
Holdren is warning about droughts that could cause famines, James M. Taylor,
the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s monthly, Environment & Climate News, took aim at the IPCC claims, noting that U.S. and global crop
production, especially the most important staple food crops, corn, rice, and
wheat, “have more than tripled since 1970. During the past few years, the
United States has set crop production records for alfalfa, cotton, beans, sugar
beets, sweet potatoes, canola, corn, flaxseed, hops, rice sorghum, soybeans,
sunflowers, peanuts and wheat, to name just a few.”

The worst
part of Obama’s lies about the so-called “greenhouse gases” that we’ve been
told for decades are warming the Earth is the way those lies are translated
into government policies. The Obama administration, via the Environmental
Protection Agency, has launched a war on coal-fired plants that produce 40% of
the nation’s electricity claiming that their emissions such as carbon dioxide
(CO2) are causing a warming that is not happening. What is happening is a
deliberate effort to drive up the cost of electricity for everyone.

America
runs on electricity and 68% of it is generated by fossil fuels, 20% by nuclear,
and 7% by hydropower. So called “clean energy”, wind and solar, provides about
4% at far higher costs than the others and exists largely due to government
subsidies and mandates.

Claims
about increased severe storms, heat waves, and hurricanes simply have no basis
in fact. In recent years there has been a record low in the numbers of
tornadoes, hurricanes, no change in the rise of sea levels, but record gains in
Arctic and Antarctic ice. None of this is reported by the mainstream media.

Yet Obama
told graduates that rising temperatures and sea levels, as well as intensifying
storm patterns represent “one of the most significant long-term challenges that
our country and our planet face.” He said this even though his administration’s
recent National Climate Assessment acknowledged that “There has been no
universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S.
since 1900.” The report, however, is being used to justify carbon-related
regulations.

While the
world’s attention is on one of the greatest threats facing it, the takeover of
northern Iraq by a barbaric Islamist group—one from which even al Qaeda
disassociated itself—Obama is talking about non-existent climate threats to
further policies that kill jobs in the U.S. and harm its struggling recovery of
our economy.

While the
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seeks to expand its control of a major
portion of the Middle East, Obama thought it was more important to lie about
the climate to college graduates.

How much
more damage Obama can inflict on the economy between now and the end of his
second term in office is unknown, but what we do know is that his priorities,
based on scare-mongering speeches about the climate will continue until he
leaves office.

Monday, June 16, 2014

The news
out of the Middle East reflects how President Obama’s policies have led to an
Islamic terrorist takeover of huge swaths of Syria and Iraq. No nation watches
these events more closely than Israel. On June 6 the chief of the Israeli
Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz cryptically remarked that the IDF is
gearing up to address the growing numbers of terrorist forces on its border
with Syria. He noted Iraq as well for good measure.

When Israel
is in the news, it is usually because it is under attack or responding to one.
The only other times have been news of “peace talks” between it and the
Palestinian Authority (PA), but none of those talks over decades has ever
achieved peace because, as the diplomatic community knows, the Palestinians do
not want it.

Most
recently, the PA announced “unity” with Hamas, a Palestinian organization that
all nations identify as terrorist. As Efraim Inbar, the director of the
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a fellow of the Middle East Forum,
recently noted, “As long as the military branch of Hamas remains independent,
there is no Palestinian unity.”

Why the PA
would engage in this charade is known only to them. There are no advantages in
it because they do not gain any presence in the Gaza Strip, the home to Hamas. As
far as the U.S. and Europe are concerned, says Inbar, “the establishment of a
real, stable Palestinian state (is) more unlikely than ever.” Hamas has already
asserted itself by kidnapping three teenagers, one of whom is an
American

Though
most U.S. taxpayers are likely unaware of it, the U.S. gives an estimated $440
million in aid to the PA every year. They are not likely to be pleased now that
the PA has entered into some form of unity with Hamas. Official State
Department statements referred to something they called “an interim
technocratic government…that does not include members affiliated with Hamas”
and made it known the U.S. expects the PA “to do everything in its power to
prevent attacks from Gaza.” A European Union spokesman said it would insist
that the new government recognize Israel’s right to exist. That will not
happen.

Israel’s
initial response was to announce plans to build 1,500 new housing units in
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, making it clear the
decision was its retaliation for the creation of the Palestinian unity
government with Hamas. Israel made it known it might withhold the taxes it
collects on behalf of the PA. This is well short of a shooting war and, of
course, the U.S. ambassador to Israel repeated the Obama administration’s
longtime opposition to new settlement construction.

What
exists at this point—and has for a long time—is an Israel that is an oasis of
sanity in the Middle East in contrast to the conflicts occurring in the
region’s other nations.

Syria is
now entering its fourth year of civil war and Israel took notice that a small
Hezbollah force took up position on June 5 on the Syrian side of the Quneitra
crossing directly opposite the Israeli Defense Force Golan deployment. It was
the first known instance of such an occurrence and will likely precede a larger
force because the al Assad regime attaches a high strategic importance to the
town.

Lebanon,
also to the north, has not been a source of conflict for many years and is
controlled these days by Hezbollah. The U.S. designates it as a terrorist
organization. Jordan to its east has felt the brunt of the Syrian civil war,
having to absorb thousands of refugees as has Lebanon and as the fanatical
forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) continues its takeover
of Iraq, Jordan has to know it is in its sights for takeover. Israel is not
likely to allow that to occur. It would put ISIS on its doorstep.

To the
West, Egypt has been working its way through the “Arab Spring”, having just
elected a new president, a former general, but one waging war against Hamas
terrorists in its Sinai region while continuing to crack down on the Muslim
Brotherhood domestically.

Israel has
long since abandoned any notion that the Obama administration is to be trusted.
As Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the
Holocaust, recently noted, the administration’s foreign policy decisions have
“deliberately driven a wedge between Obama and Israel. President Obama’s
priority is, and always has been, the Muslim world.”

The recent
exchange of five high ranked Taliban leaders, set free from Guantanamo, for a
single American soldier who is identified as a deserter suggests that Obama’s
attitude and actions pose as great a problem for the U.S. as it does for
Afghanistan and the entire Middle East.

Israel’s
primary “existential” threat is a nuclear-armed Iran and, should the day arrive
that Israel wants to stop that from occurring, it will take action just as it
did in Iraq and Syria in past times.

Meanwhile,
Mideast nations such as Saudi Arabia no longer trust the Obama administration
any more than does Israel and some have been engaging in outreach to Iran,
knowing that the current U.S. negotiations were doomed to failure from the
start.

Israel is
the only stable nation amidst the pandemonium that is the Middle East and it
will defend itself.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.